Barack Obama to meet tech industry CEOs to discuss NSA today, Zuckerberg may be there

Barack Obama is set to meet with a number of CEOs from leading technology companies later today, to continue his discussion concerning how the NSA and privacy rights affect the tech industry.

Politico quoted a White House official as saying that Obama wanted to “continue his dialogue with them on the issues of privacy, technology, and intelligence.”

Those present will apparently include Google, Facebook and Yahoo – we’d imagine Microsoft as well, but the sources who spilled these details only mentioned the above three as invited (presumably they’ll turn up). Mark Zuckerberg will apparently be there representing Facebook, at least according to one source – but Marissa Mayer can’t make it, so they say…

This all comes off the back of the President’s reforms for the NSA announced back in January, which many rights activists felt didn’t go nearly far enough (and it didn’t change anything regarding the use of bulk metadata collection for US intelligence, of course – it remains to be seen what will be done in terms of policy there, if anything).

Zuckerberg himself spoke out against the many-tentacled NSA last week, saying he was frustrated with government spying, and that the “government should be the champion for the Internet, not a threat.” He added: “They need to be much more transparent about what they’re doing, or otherwise people will believe the worst.”

And rest assured, people are believing the worst.

We’ll keep our eyes peeled for developments – this will be one interesting meeting, particularly if Zuckerberg is there, given his recent comments.